Although the VMware vSphere 6 Update Manager installation provides the option to install and configure an embedded version of SQL Express 2012 server, we will instead opt to utilize the SQL server utilized for vCenter, create a new database for Update Manager and create a system DSN entry. These steps are similar if we wanted to utilize an external SQL database for Update Manager.

This is a basic step-by-step guide on how to install VMware vSphere 6 Update Manager. This setup may be more typical for smaller type of organizations with few hosts and small numbers of virtual machines.

This is quick guide on how to install the VMware vSphere 6 Client. This is the Windows-based client which has been deprecated starting from vSphere 5.5. New features in vSphere 5.5 and later are only available in the vSphere Web Client.